Project Based Learning

9/12/2017

A month into the school year, I find myself already thinking that I need to catch up on stuff and feel like I might be falling behind somehow. I feel like as a teacher, especially a math teacher, there is never enough time to match the amount of work that is created by the standards. I'm just now getting over my first cold of the season, having missed a couple of days of school always sends a small sense of panic about how that will effect what I have attempted to establish the first month of school.

Luckily, my students have bounced back fairly well and are now getting settled into routines. I noticed today, I had a few students pick up their warm up sheet on their way to their seats today, rather than me having to pass them out to them. To most adults, this sounds like something minor, however the more autonomous I can make my classroom, the more it will be run by my students, which is always my goal.

In math, my co-teacher, Ellen, and I have settled into the idea that we really can only do four big projects a year. We have tried to do big projects with all the standards in the past, and we have failed miserably. Last year was probably my biggest failure (First Attempt In Learning) with projects. I had created a project that would fit in nicely with what science was doing and attempted to execute the project to be ready to fit in with their science work. The project ended up taking WAY too much time and proved to be more difficult because of my student's limited understandings of energy rates and real world decimals. We did complete the project, but it was not to my liking and took a lot of time away from standards that I was worried about addressing.

I attribute my failure to not doing the project originally by myself before I gave it to my students. This is a big issue that teachers face with Project Based Learning. Most teachers want to do good PBL, however most of the time, they don't have the extra time to actually do the project before they give it to the students. I feel like this is why teachers also are hesitant to try new things. When they do try new things, and they blow up in their face, teachers go back to what they know rather than tweak their failure, because it would require less work and more saving face.

Luckily I work at a school where FAILing is looked at positively and we are encouraged to use failures as growth.

Next week I will start the In and Out Project, where students will look at the different secret menus of In and Out and create functions out of different prices of the products. We have used a problem we originally did a math conference and tweaked to make it fit Design Thinking. It is one of my favorite problems to do and my hope this year is to make it more personalized with more options for students to research as well as letting them personalize the outcome of their project. Co-creating rubrics has really allowed me to personalize their learning, more than I thought possible, so I'm excited for the next couple of weeks with this project.